Bicycle! A Repair and Maintenance Manifesto
Sam Tracy

Publisher's Comments
At their finest hours bikes exist on a level above mere machines, and there's no reason why the joy should end when the ride is over.

Bicycle!, written by a working bicycle mechanic, covers everything you need to know to feed and care for your ride. This book cuts through the obtuse techno-speak and delivers maintenance clarity with a touch of humor and radicalism, while categorically denying mechanistry's supposed dreariness. Bicycle! is about encouraging society to learn for themselves how to make their bikes work, not because they have to, but because they want to. With detailed descriptions of all maintenance tasks and repair situations, clearly illustrated with photographs and drawings, this guide will serve the need for a serious rider's manual. Professional bicycle workers—messengers, mechanics, pedi-cab drivers—as well as bicycle commuters have been waiting for this book.

Tanglewreck
Jeanette Winterson

Publisher's Comments
Something frightening is happening with time. One moment, a time tornado rages through the streets of London, and those caught up in its path vanish without a trace. The next moment a woolly mammoth is seen lumbering along the banks of the River Thames. At the center of these bizarre time warps is a house called Tanglewreck, which is home to eleven-year-old Silver, her bony and bad-tempered aunt, Mrs Rokabye, and a mysterious clock known as the Timekeeper. Silver doesn’t understand exactly what the Timekeeper does, but when two sinister figures come looking for it, she knows instinctively that she must guard it with her life.

Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture
Maria Elena Buszek

Publisher's Comments
Subverting stereotypical images of women, a new generation of feminist artists is remaking the pin-up, much as Annie Sprinkle, Cindy Sherman, and others did in the 1970s and 1980s. As shocking as contemporary feminist pin-ups are intended to be, perhaps more surprising is that the pin-up has been appropriated by women for their own empowerment since its inception more than a century ago. Pin-Up Grrrls tells the history of the pin-up from its birth, revealing how its development is intimately connected to the history of feminism. Maria Elena Buszek documents the genre’s 150-year history with more than 100 illustrations, many never before published.

Beginning with the pin-up’s origins in mid-nineteenth-century carte-de-visite photographs of burlesque performers, Buszek explores how female sex symbols, including Adah Isaacs Menken and Lydia Thompson, fought to exert control over their own images. Buszek analyzes the evolution of the pin-up through the advent of the New Woman, the suffrage movement, fanzine photographs of early film stars, the Varga Girl illustrations that appeared in Esquire during World War II, the early years of Playboy magazine, and the recent revival of the genre in appropriations by third-wave feminist artists. A fascinating combination of art history and cultural history, Pin-Up Grrrls is the story of how women have publicly defined and represented their sexuality since the 1860s.

Virginity or Death!
Katha Pollit

Publisher's Comments
Through presidential administrations Democratic and Republican, Katha Pollitt has observed and exposed the inconsistencies and illogic of those who stand in the way of progress solely to hold on to their power. In defense of human rights and equality, she assails the corrupt and educates the misguided with compassion, Swiftian wit, and complete literary authority.

In this compelling collection, Pollitt skewers one hypocrite after another. She suggests, for example, that creationists be permitted to oppose the teaching of evolution only so long as they agree to forgo the benefits of the theory–such as flu vaccines. She gently wonders if those who denounced the decision to allow Terri Schiavo to die in peace would themselves be satisfied to be video-diagnosed by Senator Bill Frist. And in the title essay about fundamentalists’ antagonism toward sex education and STD prevention, she asks, “What is it with these right-wing Christians? Faced with a choice between sex and death, they choose death every time.”

Pollitt is one of the most eloquent and persuasive voices in American political conversation of this or any other era, and Virginity or Death! is a marvelous demonstration of her keen insight, mordant humor, and sense of justice.